"For the past few years, Thunderbolt has been more of a curiosity than a standard-bearer for device connectivity. While the standard was meant to usher in a new era of high-speed peripherals and device interconnects, this was limited to a few high-end products and mostly marketed towards Mac users. Several years ago, Intel combined Thunderbolt support with the USB-C standard, creating the potential for systems that were compatible with the latest and greatest USB standard with reversible plug support, while simultaneously supporting the increased bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbit/s).

Now, Intel is going one step further : It’s making the Thunderbolt 3 standard royalty-free in a bid to attract attention for the standard and improve uptake from manufacturers. There are two other key components to this development. First, Intel is going to bake Thunderbolt 3 support into its future CPUs, likely as part of the on-die I/O capabilities. Here, the technology could be key to extending capabilities like VR, which can make use of Thunderbolt 3’s bandwidth to hit high transmission speeds. Intel has never talked about a Thunderbolt 4, but if we assume that any such standard could make use of PCIe 4.0, we could see the most capable platforms in the future supporting Intel’s next-generation protocol."

Thanks for this information. You just managed to stop me purchasing a thunderbolt 3.0 add in card which requires aa thunderbolt 3 header until I find out what is happening. Hopefully they will somehow implement thunderbolt 3.0 add in cards that do not require the motherboard to have a thunderbolt header.

The requirement for a thunderbolt 3.0 header is a complete pain. My Asus Z87 Deluxe Dual has built in Thunderbolt but it does not have a thunderbolt header so I am unable to use a thunderbolt2 expansion card at present.